Recent Articles

“President Barack Obama promised over and over during the health care debate that ‘if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’ It turns out that, for a lot of people, that isn’t true… And it’s not the only hard truth Obama and the law’s supporters are facing. No matter what they said about rising health care costs, those costs aren’t actually going to go down under health care reform. The talk about the law paying for itself is just educated guesswork. And people aren’t actually liking the law more as they learn more about it — and some polls show they are just getting more confused.”

“The sweeping health overhaul law turns 2 years old this Friday. And as it heads toward a constitutional showdown at the Supreme Court next week, the debate over the measure remains almost as heated as the day President Obama signed it into law. In fact, public opinion about the law remains divided along partisan lines to almost exactly the same extent it was when the law was signed on March 23, 2010, according to the latest monthly tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.”

“President Obama will not mark the two-year anniversary of his signing of the healthcare law — which takes place days before the Supreme Court offers a decision on the constitutionality of his signature legislative achievement. Senior administration officials said on Tuesday that Obama will not be offering a vigorous public defense of the law, holding events or even making public remarks in the lead-up to the Supreme Court case. “

“Young healthy men earning $28,000 a year can expect to pay nearly 100 percent more for health insurance, even after counting the new tax credits for which most will be eligible. Young healthy males at higher income levels earning about $45,000 a year can expect to pay two-and-a-half times more for health insurance in 2014, according to studies produced by independent actuaries who are helping the Hoosier state calculate the impact of Obamacare. The premium-cost increases are caused primarily by two key provisions in Obamacare — ‘essential health benefits,’ in which the government determines what must be covered by health-insurance policies, and the community rating provisions, which require health insurers to level out premiums so younger people pay more and older people pay less.”

“About 16 million people — half of the 32 million who are expected to get health coverage under the new health law — will be enrolled in Medicaid in January of 2014, with almost no changes to improve or modernize the cumbersome, complex, and wasteful program. This large Medicaid expansion could have catastrophic effects on those who provide society’s health care safety net.”

“The presence of externalities and other market imperfections does not justify a departure from the normal rules of the constitutional road. Health care is typically consumed locally, and health-insurance markets themselves primarily operate within the states. The administration’s attempt to fashion a singular, universal solution is not necessary to deal with the variegated issues arising in these markets. States have taken the lead in past reform efforts. They should be an integral part of improving the functioning of health-care and health-insurance markets.”

“On March 13, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) updated its score of Obamacare, announcing that the program is $48 billion cheaper than in its previous 2011 score.
The primary reason for this change is that more individuals will lose their employer-provided coverage than originally anticipated, and the government will collect $99 billion more in taxes and penalties. CBO also finds that there are more uninsured individuals.
In short, this new CBO update continues the trend of Obamacare becoming increasingly expensive and decreasingly effective with each new scoring update.”

“As we approach the second anniversary of ObamaCare, it’s worth re-examining some of the claims its proponents made about the impact of the law on health-care costs. Three of the law’s most-touted cost-control measures have already been shown to be unlikely to succeed.”

“Yesterday, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and with the shifted timeline, the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now escalated to $1.76 trillion. So I’ve created the updated graph below. Notice how low the numbers are in the 2010 to 2013 time period and how they quickly soar. All the spending to the right of the black line wasn’t reflected in the CBO’s estimate for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) at the time of passage.”